By Will Day, Alaska Airmen’s Association
This past April, the engine in my Cessna 140 failed. A good friend and I were two hundred feet off the ground above the end of runway 20L at Birchwood Airport when the cockpit grew abruptly silent. With no time for errant thought, I dropped the nose, banked right toward the inlet, aimed just above the trees, and the underbelly of the Cessna just cleared the spruce tops. A quick glance showed my airspeed needle quivering a mile an hour above stalling. I punched the yoke forward and dove for the marsh. We levelled-off five feet above the ground, milking every bit of the lift. And then, it was gone, and my beautiful blue Cessna dropped and bounced hard along the semi-frozen, pockmarked taiga. We hit three times before my tire struck a tussock, and like a child who has just learned not to clamp down on a bike’s front tire break, we tipped onto the spinner. The plane teetered for a moment—as if contemplating the tedium of filing an insurance claim—before finally flipping onto its back. Thirty seconds from engine failure to hanging from our harnesses. We were profoundly lucky to be unscathed.
I sat in the parking lot after being airlifted back to my nearby tiedown, pondering how we’d escaped death. There had been so many little automatic decisions in those 30 seconds that, made incorrectly, would have led to a fatal stall or spin or an impact with the trees. Yet, in each of those moments, I’d made a correct choice. What were the chances? It’s important not to misinterpret my meaning. I am no ace pilot, and I have no special talent. In fact, I was a crisply minted, hundred-hour pilot. Yet, I made successful decisions, and we survived. It felt critical to learn why that had happened. How exactly had I inadvertently prepared myself for that moment?
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Earlier that year, I took my Private Pilot check ride. During that flight, my examiner completely reduced the power—simulating an engine failure—500 feet directly above an airstrip, and I overshot the runway. It was a shocking experience because I’d thought myself so prepared for that test. I had never practiced an engine failure under those circumstances and was completely caught off guard.
Over the next several months, I spent many hours glued to my home simulator. I set the computer to fail my engine randomly every five to twenty minutes. The digital Cessna plunged out of the sky just after take-off, over the Cook Inlet, along the Turnagain Arm, deep in the Eklutna Valley, and over Whittier. It landed on highways, tundra, mud flats, and gravel bars. Initially, I succeeded landing safely about 50 percent of the time. So, I practiced until I could invariably bring the plane to the ground safely. Gradually, I built up an instinctive response to the engine dying; I could bring the plane to the ground without deliberating. I believe this practice is what saved us over Birchwood.
I’m not a psychologist nor a neuroscientist, but my best layman’s guess is that the simulator allowed me to build muscle memory. So, when the actual failure happened, I had habits in place that took over and prevented me from panicking or freezing up.
Unfortunately, the current state of flight training—at least in Alaska—does not adequately prepare students for encountering the unlikely scenario of complete powerplant failure. Instructors (often just out of flight training themselves) often train students to make dead-stick landings under ideal conditions, with plenty of altitude, above a field, or within easy gliding distance of an airstrip. While the chance of encountering an engine failure may be statistically unlikely, it does happen, and the consequences can easily turn fatal—especially in our heavily forested, roadless, and mountainous terrain. Here are the suggestions of someone who is not a certified instructor, but was lucky to survive when his number came up:
Find or buy a realistic simulator, install X-Plane 11 or Microsoft Flight Simulator, and adjust the settings to create maximum realism. If you haven’t used a simulator in a while, they have come a very long way recently and are surprisingly realistic. Adjust the settings to create engine failures randomly during flight sessions. Practice dead-stick landings until you survive all of them. Then, practice recurrently going forward. The simulator is effective because it allows you to physically practice the entire procedure—from failure to landing—without real consequence.
If you live in Anchorage, stop by the Alaska Airmen’s Association office building at Lake Hood. We have a state-of-the-art home simulator that members can use for free. We’ll happily set you up and give you a quick tutorial.
Download Capricious Timer (or a similar app) from the App Store. Set the timer to go off randomly during every flight you take in an actual airplane. When the timer goes off, simulate an engine failure if you can do so safely. If you are not in a safe place to practice, mentally walk through where you would go and how you would get the plane down. There is tremendous efficacy in visualizing how you would respond to an emergency.
Objectively reconsider your low-flying habits. Do you ever fly over inhospitable terrain at such a low altitude that recovering from an engine failure would be impossible? After crashing, I think about this all the time. For example, I’ve seen a lot of float planes routinely cruise a hundred feet above the forest. Is that ever a safe practice?
Consider using the entire runway instead of starting your takeoff run mid-field. Why sacrifice a margin of safety just to save yourself the time it would take to taxi back to the threshold? If your engine quits just after takeoff (like mine did on go-around), you’ll want to have started as far back as possible, so you can land on the remaining runway or so you have the maximum amount of altitude to work with.
Re-think flying shallow approach angles. Glide-angle approaches are steeper, but they will ensure you will make the runway if your engine hiccups or gives out.
I hope the statistics are more favorable for you in your piloting journey. In case they are not, I hope my lessons might help you avoid that final flight west.
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